Guest post by Zehra Madhavan ’20 When I started working at Digital Collections as a Student Assistant during the spring semester of my freshman year, my understanding of Amherst College’s history was limited to facts I had read about in pamphlets and bits and pieces of information I had picked up in various lectures and…
Behind the letters, images, photographs, and other treasures on display in Amherst College Digital Collections is software. To the public, this software is largely invisible, with our user interface showcasing the discovery and display of the digital objects from Archives and Special Collections. Our underlying software infrastructure requires ongoing maintenance, upkeep, and upgrade as technology…
As the summer winds down and we move into the fall semester I was able to take stock of the past year and the progress we’ve made in the imaging lab in the library. I started in my position at Amherst in late May 2017 and I spent most of the summer learning about the…
One of the things we often say about the archival materials we are digitizing and adding to ACDC is that we never know what researchers will do with our materials once we release them into the world wide web. The Papers of Edward and Orra White Hitchcock and Orra White Hitchcock’s Classroom Drawings were among…
Guest post by Avery Farmer ’20 When I visited the British Royal Observatory in Greenwich during a vacation in London this year, I was captivated by a series of rooms dedicated to a history of time. Not time, the grand spiritual and scientific setting of our own existence, but humans’ attempts in the last 500…
Throughout the past year or so, the staff of the Digital Programs department have been working regularly with our colleagues in Archives and Special Collections regarding born digital material. We define born digital as material that was created and is stored electronically. Examples can include emails, websites, social media posts, and digital photos, just to…
The work of digitizing archival and special collections material is not a “traditional” library activity. Times have changed in libraries. Change is a constant in our work – perhaps that is what hasn’t changed. Change is in the evolving materials that cross the desk of our archivists and metadata librarians as they organize and describe…
This month the Digital Programs Group began digitizing the College Photographers Records Collection. The collection includes more than 400,000 negatives taken by the official photographers of Amherst college from 1962-2005; A visual history of the college for the second half of the twentieth century. Using negative collections housed in archives tends to be a challenge….
One of the first tasks of the Bicentennial Working Group was to identify the collections that would be part of the Bicentennial Project. When choosing those collections, we had to balance several factors, including how closely related the topics of the collection were to the College and its history, how useful we thought the collection…
Lately I’ve been focusing on replacing/upgrading our zoomable image viewer in our digital repository. The current version of the tool lacks a few features which folks have been asking for – one of which is rotation. In an instance where you have a manuscript that has writing in two directions, being able to rotate the image…